Somehow over the years, the automotive industry has convinced us that the new calendar year begins in October. After all, that is when the next model year is commercially available, complete with all the new bells and whistles to make life easier and more complete, as well as drive demand for the latest and greatest on four wheels. In many ways, that same upgrade fever affects our technology buying patterns, highlighting the incremental improvements that promise fewer clicks, seamless integrations, greater ease of use, new buttons and widgets, and new-found productivity. But just as that new car will likely have less impact on making your cross-country road trip memorable than the route than you choose to take, the success of new technology implementations, like virtualization, is more about the business benefit realized by your company and less about the features of the technology.
That’s not to say that there is no difference between a luxury sedan and an economy subcompact, but six months after the trip, it’s unlikely that anyone will comment on the leather seats, dual-zone climate control or satellite radio. What they will remember are the places they visited, food shared, moments enjoyed and events that captured their attention.
While virtualization technology itself has tremendous potential to improve IT processes, reduce operational costs and save energy for many business organizations, the road to success, failure or other “memorable moments” with this technology is also heavily dependent on the route that you plan, the stops that you make and the real-time traffic reports you use to guide your way. Like the many roads leading to your desired vacation destination, your network could contain the potholes and pitfalls to detour your initiative or ultimately make it a traffic fatality. A roadmap including insight to the physical infrastructure supporting the fancy new car of virtualization can not only successfully get you to your final destination, but also make it a trip worth reliving.
Map Your Route
Making informed decisions about the correct mix and deployment of virtualization technology requires more than just the reams of data points you can collect about its operation. This forest of data can obscure your view and prevent you from noticing the trend of trees that whittle away at your ROI. The thousands of dollars saved in hardware costs by virtualized servers can easily be negated if every user accessing the enterprise application hosted on that virtual instance now must wait for their transactions to complete.
Virtual servers enable higher utilization rates on physical servers, leading to greater enterprise efficiencies. However, with each added virtual server, the business risk of failure increases. Instead of risking just one enterprise application, the physical server becomes a single point of failure for multiple applications and a broader range of end users. More users are vying for information across the server’s network interface card and the traffic from multiple network segments converges on the hosting switch. The decision to host another enterprise application on a physical server is not just about the server’s spare CPU cycles; it requires balancing the number of users, network traffic and physical capacity of the complete infrastructure along the entire route from user to server.
However, simple reports and tabulated data are of minimal value in analyzing complex, multivariable, interdependent data sets. New graphical and interactive Web-based dashboards deliver contemporary flexibility and interactivity for selecting, exploring, analyzing and visualizing data to uncover previously unknown trends and patterns and empower strategic business decisions.
Your 10,000-Mile Checkup
One of the key benefits of virtualization technologies is the ability to virtualize servers. Not only does this enable rapid deployment of various operating systems, but it reduces maintenance costs, takes less administrative time to manage, saves on energy consumption/costs, reduces capital expenditures and mitigates security risks. Since each virtual machine (VM) is encapsulated into a self-contained instance, multiple virtual servers can be deployed onto a single physical server, allowing organizations to achieve higher, more cost-effective utilization rates – particularly on x86 platforms.
More than 80 percent of server shipments today utilize x86 architectures. High-density x86 rack servers make physical deployments easy and allow for better real estate management in the data center. However, a typical x86 server only uses five to 10 percent of its available computational capacity on a daily basis. Using multiple virtual servers can boost utilization to the 60 to 70 percent range recommended by capacity planning experts, reducing power and cooling requirements as well as the need to acquire new hardware as the business must add new enterprise applications. This practice can also enable rapid deployment of various operating systems, help reduce overall maintenance costs, decrease the amount of administrative time required to manage the network and mitigate security risks.
Practice Defensive Driving
Another key benefit to virtualization technology is the speed and ease of deploying new instances for a broad range of uses. Test environments can be quickly implemented to validate new enterprise applications, isolated environments can be secured to quarantine sensitive projects or mitigate viral attacks, or requisite operating systems can be configured despite lacking the supporting physical hardware. Its range of application, ease of use and deployment, and versatility have IT organizations using it faster and broader than even the virtualization solution providers could have imagined. This explosion and ensuing operational difficulties has even spawned the term “VM sprawl” to describe the phenomenon.
It’s not enough to know that a certain number of VMs are deployed or even just the location at which they are deployed. Technologies can dynamically move them between physical servers when VM performance degrades. In doing so, however, the route from the user to the business application they require has also changed – possibly negating the overall intended effect. The number of network device hops could increase. The throughput of those devices, the capacity of that network segment, or the makeup of the overall traffic could be negatively impacted. The result would thus give the user perceived performance degradation. A management solution that tracks VMs as they move about the network and assesses the overall performance contribution of the network gives operations personnel the ability to study, understand and document compliance, allowing them to provision capacity, delivering users optimum performance.
